A background slide is a type of PowerPoint (or Keynote, for Mac users) slide that works very well for both song lyrics and for presentation pages after the title slide. Essentially, it's a muted version of the theme slide, with the titles deleted. If you're not quite sure what I mean, you can see an example of variations on a theme slide for worship here.

Making a background slide is incredibly easy, yet many people who are not very familiar with computer graphics often don't realize just what a simple process it is. Here's a step-by-step tutorial, using a simple slide I created using a stock image and a terrific, free graphics program called IrfanView. You can do the same thing with virtually every graphics program—even in PowerPoint or your favorite worship software program if you wish—but IrfanView's worth downloading due to its huge feature set, tiny size, and super-stable performance. (IrfanView is a PC program. Mac users, you may wish to try Seashore.)

Think for a second about some of the ways your congregation members care for one another or for others in the community during a time of need. Perhaps you deliver meals to elderly members, families with a new baby, or individuals who have experienced a death in the family. Maybe you have had to help a family rebuild their lives after a fire, flood, or other disaster. Probably the pastor or others visit individuals who are in the hospital. Maybe you serve a meal once each month at a homeless shelter and need volunteer help. The list can go on and on.

Coordinating all of these tasks and volunteers can be a daunting task, but it's a super simple process when you sign up for (and use, of course!) a free Lotsa Helping Hands account. This incredible web-based service gives you the ability to add and track tasks, have volunteers sign up for slots, send reminders to volunteers, share information about an individual's situation, and much more. Lotsa Helping Hands requires no special technological skills or equipment...and again, it's FREE! Anyone with web access can utilize the Community you create. The only problem you might have is that sometimes the slots available can fill up so fast that not everyone who wants to offer help can do so! You'll also want to recruit one person from the church who will serve as the lead Coordinator. (This could be a staff person, but why not pass on that opportunity to a congregation member?)

Since today is Tuesday, it must be technology day! As the Blogger-in-chief of Different Voice, Tim does an excellent job of keeping all of us up-to-date on technology and its potential uses in Christian Education. However, we like to give Tim a Tuesday off every once in awhile. That’s when I bring my “using but not completely understanding technology” viewpoint to Tuesday’s email. Today, I have a website recommendation for you. As promised yesterday, this website is a resource available to congregations and Sunday School teachers to encourage acceptance of persons with special needs.

Last week, popular church futurist Len Sweet was temporarily banned from Facebook after someone tagged one of his podcast links as hostile. That action had ripple effects, and before long his iTunes podcast was being blocked or seen as spam by some of the major internet blocklists. The content in the podcast can hardly be seen as hostile (listen to it here if you wish), but the incident raises many questions. Here's one practical one: what happens to all of your digital "stuff" (photos, podcasts, blog posts, Facebook friends, etc.) if for one reason or another you are blocked or a website goes out of business?

The reality is that when it comes to web businesses, you may have little or no warning before everything you created goes poof. If that possibility gives you chills, what's the solution? As with all of the data on your computer's hard drive, it's summed up in four words: Backup. Your. Stuff. Regularly.

It has happened to all of us at one time or another. We visit a website and find an article we absolutely must eventually read, but later the page seems to be gone. Or, we want to cite a page from an online article in a column or school assignment, but a few weeks later the article has been edited. Or, you find an article that features someone in your congregation that you'd like to share with that person, but when you print the article it looks nothing like you think it should.

In situations like these, screenshot software can be just what you need. A screenshot is just an image of a web page or portion thereof. If you've ever looked at a software tutorial online, you've undoubtedly seen screenshots. Recently, a new online tool, Aviary, has made the process of taking screenshots of entire web pages (and not just the visible portion, as many other tools do) a...um...snap! The videos on the Aviary page do a great job of explaining what their tools can do (which is a LOT more than just screenshots! Aviary can take and edit images, edit colors, edit vector images, markup images, and even edit audio.) And, amazingly, you can do it all for free! Aviary was even named the #1 underhyped web application of 2009 by Lifehacker.com.

If you still use color inkjet or laser printers in your office, computer lab, home, or elsewhere, you undoubtedly know well that ink and toner costs eat up a huge chunk of your tech budget. There are, of course, simple and free solutions to reducing your ink/toner usage, such as printing in draft mode, previewing pages to print only those you really need, and setting your default to greyscale.

However, these solutions are not always perfect, and they are hard to enforce in a public setting like a church computer lab. That's when print software can be helpful. Here are several tools worth exploring...

I would say that I know just enough about computers to be dangerous. Generally, I know how to make the computer do the things I need it to do, but I do not understand much about how that actually happens. The same is true of audiovisual equipment. We do not have a TV, VCR or DVD player (except for our computer) at our house, so my experience with these machines is limited. Essentially, I am in the position of knowing how to use technology, but when something goes wrong I am not the person that you want in charge!

Fortunately, I have what I fondly refer to as my own personal tech support. When I need help with technology, I call my 15 year old son.

A Google Profile is a special page in Google's system that makes it easier for people to find you or learn more about you. When might this be useful to you as a Christian educator?

Suppose you're at a school event and someone you meet wants to continue the conversation the two of you had. You could, of course, pass on your business card, but if you didn't have one handy you could simply provide your new friend with your Google profile name, which he or she could easily find online later. Or, if you were applying for new Christian education positions, a Google profile helps you to make sure that one of the first pages potential employers would see if they searched for you would be a profile you created. Your church staff members - especially the clergy - could (and perhaps should) have a completed profile so that potential visitors can learn more about them. (A side benefit: this simple act -- if you include the church website -- can potentially help your Google ranking, which is based in part on the number of outside links that go to a site.)

Last week I encouraged you to think about how and where you can share your news, publications, class handouts, and so on online. Today, let's think about the flip side: when should you keep things off of the web?

There are no "standard" rules, so you will need to develop your own as a congregation. Here are a few guidelines to get you started. You probably will not want to post...

• Photos of children or youth, unless you have explicit written permission from parents. As a "Safe Sanctuary" practice, if you do include photos of young people on your website, consider identifying them only by their first names. 
• Images that are poor in quality. Not only does this refer to images that are poorly framed, out-of-focus, or clearly outdated (bad clip-art, anyone?), but it also includes images that could reflect poorly on your programming. As a friend reminded me, don't post "...images of VBS or other activities where all you see is kids running around."
• Newsletters that are more than a month or two old. Many congregations keep newsletters online far too long. Honestly, who wants or needs to read the old news? Two months of newsletters is certainly plenty, with a link to the newsletter editor who can be contacted if back issues are truly required.

If you want to move beyond having a church website that is essentially a digital brochure to one that is part of an Internet ministry, you need to continually put the web and other digital technologies on your agendas -- your personal to-do list, of course, but also on the agenda of your committees and teams. Talking about the website and other digital forms of communication reminds your leaders that ministry in a digital age requires everyone to learn to "think digitally."

Here are 22 examples of questions you could ask:

• How will we share this information on our website?
• Are there other websites where we could promote this event / share this information?
• Who can share this on Facebook / Twitter / MySpace / etc.?
• Who will take digital photos that can be shared on Flickr?
• Can we capture this event on digital video to share with others?